Mark Twain's thoughts on the telephone when Alexander Graham Bell asked him for an investment to start AT&T. Twain thought he, his lawyer and couple of rich people would be the only ones to need such a device and he passed on being an early investor.

I think a big part of taking product criticism is understanding if the critic is commenting on the product for them, or for everyone. If the former, you can ask yourself if you're really building the product for that person, or if you can look elsewhere for more targeted feedback.

> * the one by Thomas Watson about the worldwide computer market needing only 5 computers

The interesting thing is, the context of that quote is building-sized computers being accessed by terminals over the phone network.

Fast forward to 2017 and we have terminals (smartphones) accessing building-sized computers (datacentres) over the (wireless) phone network.

We can be more charitable by treating all of a company's datacentres as one big, distributed computer. In which case, what's the world market? It's easy to pick 5 that cover a big chunk of it; e.g. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon :)

> Hindsight is funny :)

So is survivorship bias. There's countless other times where the naysayers were spot on and their comments are long forgotten because the predicted failure happened. It's more a commentary on the wisdom of being a detractor. Unless it's going to be a truly spectacular failure, you're better off not saying anything since you'll either be right or remembered but not both.

This should be pondered by the number of quotes of people believing their product is definitely the future. Well, if we ever find them, because nobody remember failed start up owners (until they become successful that is).

We should however easily find quotes from demo of failed products, such as the Zune being the greatest thing ever...